Your Right to Know

WASHINGTON— President Barack Obama said corporate America has done well under his economic
policies, telling
TheEconomist magazine that CEOs should stop complaining about regulations and show greater
social responsibility.

“If you look at what’s happened over the last four or five years, the folks who don’t have a
right to complain are the folks at the top,” Obama said in an interview conducted last week and
posted on the magazine’s website late on Saturday.

Republicans have sought to portray Obama as anti-business, and businesses have complained that
Obama’s signature health-care law and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms have raised costs.

Business groups are lobbying against his new plan to curb climate-changing carbon emissions from
power plants.

“I would take the complaints of the corporate community with a grain of salt,” Obama said,
arguing that his policies have been friendly to business. “They always complain about regulation.
That’s their job.”

Obama increasingly has promoted populist economic measures such as raising the minimum wage to
motivate Democratic voters ahead of critical November congressional elections, in which his
Democrats face the prospect of losing control of the Senate.

“I am concerned about making sure that we have a system in which the ordinary person who is
working hard and is being responsible can get ahead,” he said.

Obama had a frosty relationship with business in his first term, famously telling an
interviewer: “I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall
Street."

The White House has toned down that rhetoric in Obama’s second term.

Obama slammed Republicans for what he termed a thread of “anti-globalization” that has stalled
reauthorization of funding for the Export-Import Bank, which he said would hurt U.S. businesses
trying to finance overseas trade.